A Word Is Worth a Thousand Sounds

Spoken word, blending blues and drones, and some Record Store Day picks.

II. Résumé: Jonathan Kane's February

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Jonathan Kane likes repetition: For the last 40 years, the New York City drummer has embraced repeated musical movements, from his first love of the blues and its 12-bar structure, through the roiling dirges of early music by Swans and to his latter-day embrace of loud-as-rock minimalism and its insistence on reiterated themes.

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"Blues in itself is a minimalist art form," says Kane, who gushes more than talks when music is the topic. "So when I started being exposed to experimental music, it was like, "Why, of course I like this music. Because it's a lot like what I've always liked.'"

With his band February, Kane has been able to do what very few musicians, artists or people are able to do-- put a few of your greatest passions in one place and figure out how they work together. For decades, Kane has backed Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio with volume-- pounding the drums behind a barrage of E notes, strummed into clouds of overtones and oblivion. And for decades, in some form or another, he's played the blues, whether going at them traditionally with his brother, Anthony, or stretching them for hours with composer La Monte Young.

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On record and on stage, February ecstatically does both, with three guitarists triggering between blues riffs ahead of a rhythm section (anchored, of course, by Kane but featuring Bear in Heaven bassist Adam Wills) that absolutely fucking thunders. At once, the blues and 20th century composition glow as one.

"It's just the essence of something I love," he says. "I hear it in my own way and recontextualize it."

Given Kane's impressive career and string of notable bands, we asked him to take us through some of the most notable phases of his career, explaining what he gave each band and what, in turn, they gave to the music that has become his own.

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THE START

"My mother figured I'd either be a boxer or a drummer, because I was always pounding away inside of her. That may have just been a cute story she wanted to tell, but beyond that fact, I got a little drum set when I was a kid. My dad is a photographer; he photographed a lot of musicians, The Who and Cream and Janis Joplin. He himself was a musician and played drums, so he bought me a conga drum when I was about six or seven years old. At some point, I went into an Elvis period, and that was important in my development because there was this song I called "One Night With You." A lot of his songs are a blues forms, with rock'n'roll being another way of playing the blues. "One Night with You" was very much a blues track. So I think I got that in my head very early on. Then, I stumbled upon a Johnny Winter record, before he was signed to Columbia. He has a record on Imperial Records (first released on Sonobeat) called The Progressive Blues Experiment. I heard that record when I was about 11 years old, and I became obsessed with it, reading everything I could about this guy from Texas. That was the beginning of a lifelong obsession with the blues."

THE KANE BROTHERS BLUES BAND

"We actually just played about a month ago at the Bearsville Theater near Woodstock. We dust ourselves off about once a year and just have a great time doing our thing. But my brother, Anthony, is a world-class harmonica player, and a great, great singer. He's a bluesman through and through; I took a hard left turn in my early 20s into avant-garde and experimental music, but I've never lost my love for the blues. I always circle back to that sooner or later. It's a groove that I never grow weary of playing; it's sort of like going back to school."

SWANS

"After the Kane Brothers Blues Band broke up, I studied at Berklee School of Music for a while. I was heavily into jazz. Somewhere around my very early 20s, a friend of mine who plays on the first Swans record named Daniel Galli-Duani, played avant-garde experimental music. I became really obsessed with that and highly interested in people who were trying to change the sound of music. When I hit New York after college and started looking for bands to work with, I was drawn to people who were trying to rethink the façade and architecture of music. The people I fell in with were doing that in a rock context. And I was thrilled to be working with adventurous people who were really interested and motivated to change the DNA of music.

"But I was a blues nut. Getting back to my friend and great teacher, Daniel Galli-Duani had me listening to a lot of North African trance music and the master drummers. So when I started working with Swans, my main motivation was: Don't just play a rock beat. Number two was: Well, where do you go for your inspiration? It was going right back to my roots in the blues and also in that heavy North African trance thing. They're not unrelated in the fact that there's a subdivision of 12 to 6 to 4 in time, inherent in both blues and trance music. You can take a rock beat, and you can seal it differently. That's what I did with Swans: I cut the groove in half, and it was directly related to my interest in blues and my interest in North African trance music. It became, I think, an integral part of the sound of early Swans.

"No matter what I played my whole life, I've always believed that a drum sounds better when you hit it really hard. When I was working with Swans in New York in the early days, I was beating the crap out of the drums because always did anyway and because they were so fucking loud. I mean, you had to play that hard to be able to know what you were playing. Back in those days, only a few of the places we were working in had any kind of a PA that was suitable and could do much with the incredible volumes we were pushing out. A function of wanting to be heard even a tiny bit was having to beat my brains out for that group."

RHYS CHATHAM'S GUITAR TRIO

"I played my first gig with Rhys in about 1981. I met Rhys at the same time that I was developing Swans with Michael Gira, and I played a couple of gigs with him around New York. Then, in the spring of 1982, Rhys called me up to ask if I wanted to do a tour with him in the United States with the Kitchen Tour USA One. It was package tour including some really great artists, like Fab Five Freddy and the Rock Steady Crew, taking hip-hop out into Middle America at this time. We toured all around the States on that, and that was the basis for a pretty long-term musical relationship with Rhys. I did play rock beats because he really wanted them, but I think I drove it hard and made them swing in my own particular way. I loved what Rhys was doing with sound, following in the path started by other people like La Monte Young and Tony Conrad.

"When Rhys watched February play, he goes, "Wow, you actually can play a chord and still get the harmonics." I think Rhys and all those great guys, like Tony and La Monte, they all have an element of the mathematician and the physicist. There's a lot of concerns on their part about the physics of sound, and I'm much more of a caveman than that. I mean, I'm coming at it from a drummer's perspective, so I just instinctively played the guitar I was capable of playing. I found I could still get the harmonics anyways. So it works for me."

LA MONTE YOUNG'S FOREVER BAD BLUES BAND

There's really this commitment when you know what you're playing is going to take about three hours. It's easy to get bored playing anything; man, when you've got three hours in front of you, you better fucking love what you're doing.

"I met La Monte through Rhys. He said that he loved my playing and he was putting together a blues band and would I be interested in playing with him. I was like "Oh, well yes. Of course." So I started working with La Monte. I thought I knew something about playing for extended periods of time from my work with Rhys, but playing with La Monte took that to a whole new level. The piece when we first played it was an hour non-stop, and that was just at the rehearsals. By the time we did our first performance in Germany, it was up to two hours. Over the course of the next 10 years of working with him, it ended up being about a three-hour piece. It required incredible concentration and stamina. I had to tap into resources that I never even really knew that I had.

"I constantly looked to La Monte for inspiration because I figured if this man could play for five hours with The Well-Tuned Piano then I should be able to handle three hours. There's really this commitment when you know what you're playing is going to take about three hours. It's easy to get bored playing anything; man, when you've got three hours in front of you, you better fucking love what you're doing.

"Mostly I locked into La Monte. The rest of the band were all fine, but for me, it was all about listening to him and responding to him and learning how to stretch your thinking process out over a vast stretch of time."

FEBRUARY

"Around 2004, I started writing my own music for massed electric guitar, with no question whatsoever that a large component of the sonic construct of my music was experienced and influenced by Rhys. But I married it to my other huge passion in life, the blues. I became less concerned about the purity of the notes and more concerned about the density of the groove. I found that was accomplished sonically without worrying about all the math and science. Just let me groove. At the end of the day, there's nothing I really want to do more than swing. I don't mean swing like jazz; I mean, swing hard with a backbeat and just feel that kind of a freedom that I get when I'm playing a certain kind of rhythmic setup.

"I started playing guitar in earnest in 2004. With February, it all starts with the riffs, and I go very often to my great heroes and influences like John Lee Hooker, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and sometimes into even more electric blues artists like T-Bone Walker or Buddy Guy. I'll find a riff I like, and I'll try to adapt it to something of my own.

"I'm lucky to have an old drum machine-- a Korg KR 55 that I bought in 1978, and it has this magical button on it called "swing". Any beat that's on there, from pop-rock to cha-cha, you can make it swing with the magical swing button. That's the feel that I wanted. I'd start laying guitar tracks on top of that. And as the process goes along, I would go and play my real drums over and get rid of the drum machine track altogether.

"With February, I try to steal the essence of the groove and the feeling and the intention behind the music but without all the solos and the grandstanding. I love the blues, but there are things about it that I wish weren't there from time to time. That's what I try to get out of February, stealing what it is I love about it and then pushing that, and bringing in what I've learned through working with people like La Monte Young or Rhys. I've always been working with people in pursuit of sound; sometimes, what I love in the blues has got nothing to do with that, so with February, it's like sticking these two things together that I love and being thrilled that it actually seems to work."